Video: mobile ‘opportunity for more local content’

Mr Davis was part of a CEO panel discussion on the potential of mobile, and other topics, at the Future Forum, hosted by The Newspaper Works.

Other panel members were News Corp Australia’s Julian Clarke, Fairfax Media’s Greg Hywood, West Australian Newspapers’ Chris Wharton and The Newspaper Works chairman Michael Miller.

Mr Davis echoed comments by WPP founder Sir Martin Sorrell. “In a global world, becoming as local as you can is the most important thing because the publications that we have in local areas are the most important things to that community,” he said.

“And to be able to provide stories on your mobile phone when you wake up about what happened overnight in Toowoomba is an incredible experience. If you want to learn more, you can then go in and look at an online newspaper and find out a bit more, and … you can read it in the next day’s paper for more in depth analysis.”

Mr Davis said mobile was the most exciting development to occur in the industry. “It means that newspapers can now be broadcasters, they can be visual, they can be instantaneous, they can drive data, and it should be absolutely embraced,” he said.

“It’s the core of what this industry should be, is going to be, in the next five to 10 years. We shouldn’t think about legacy businesses, we shouldn’t think about old business models; this is the reality … the mobile phone is the future and we have to actually embrace it and look forward to it.”

As an industry, news publishers needed to provide mobile business solutions for their audience, Greg Hywood said.

“That means absolutely understanding what those audience needs are, and providing a really high quality element of that,” he said.

Julian Clarke believed the issue of monetising mobile is one that needs to be addressed.

“The issue is that marketers will need to … find ways to use mobile. The gap at the moment is to find how to monetise that,” he said.

Watch out for more videos from the CEO panel and Future Forum presentations.